Service level agreements (SLAs) and other contracts play a significant role in the operation of many businesses. For example, in the insurance industry, insurers may have SLAs with numerous service providers (or vendors) who provide various desired services to their customers when losses occur. Examples of such services may include water damage repair and mitigation, fire and smoke damage repair, and the like.
Service providers under an SLA are tasked to perform various assignments based on the terms of the SLA. When a service provider is tasked and performs an assignment, a record of that assignment is typically generated. These assignment records may include various information about the performance of the assignment by the service provider, including a number of types of information such as descriptions of the assignment, the procedures followed in performing the assignment, costs of performing the assignment, receipts, bills, reports produced by the service provider and/or the assigning company, evaluations of performance and/or customer satisfaction, etc. Because of the large number of assignments that are performed by providers and the amount of information typically contained in the record for each assignment, it may be difficult for the assigning company to efficiently, yet accurately, assess the performance of the service provider.
Even after the assigning company has identified and separated out viable performance data from each record, it may still be difficult to develop an overall assessment of the service provider's performance. In many cases, much of the performance data contained in the assignment records is of a subjective and qualitative nature. This makes aggregating the performance data over multiple assignments difficult. When data is successfully aggregated, the large volume of the data presents challenges in terms of presenting the data to users in formats that are concise and easily comprehensible. Furthermore, the subjective and qualitative nature of the data makes it extremely difficult to compare the performance of different service providers, particularly if these service providers are performing under SLAs with different terms. This becomes ever more difficult if the providers are performing different types of tasks (e.g. water damage repair versus fire and smoke damage repair). Therefore, different means of performance assessment may be necessary. However, it would still be desirable to compare the performance of the different service providers taking into account the differences in their contract terms. Additionally, because of the current verbose formats for the presentation of service provider data, dissemination of the data requires extensive use of color print-outs, paper, binders, and other materials that have a negative environmental impact. Out of concern for the environment, it would be desirable to present service provider performance data in a compact format that optimizes the use of available resources.
Current technologies do not meet the needs of users as described above. Therefore, new technologies are required to aggregate and quantify subjective performance data and to present the performance data to users in a concise and actionable format.